The consensus says that Windows XP has boosted corporate PC sales and acted as a performance enhancing drug. There's an argument that enterprises may keep refreshing PCs because the installed base is ancient.

At Hot Chips, Nvidia revealed some of Denver's surprises and showed the first performance test results for this souped-up version of the Tegra K1 processor designed for smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks.

The latest Y Series processors use so little power that they are now a viable option for fanless tablets and 2-in-1 devices. HP is the first to announce a 2-in-1 with the latest Haswell-Y chip, but will others follow?

The demand for more performance and features has traditionally kept the PC from falling too far, too fast. Those days may now be ending, hastened by cheap tablets. The industry is responding with new platforms for low-cost laptops and tablets running Windows 8 and Android.

A new report from Soluto uses data from its massive online database of PC crashes, hangs, and performance metrics to identify the 10 most reliable Windows PCs you can buy today. Surprisingly, a MacBook Pro is at the top of the list. Even more surprising is who's not included.

A team of researchers from North Carolina State University say they may have cracked the problem of Wi-Fi hotspots buckling under the pressure of too many concurrent users, through a tool they have developed called WiFox.

Taiwanese PC maker looks to supplement PC business with cloud services after announcing acquisition of U.S. cloud vendor iGware in US$320 million deal, with further US$75 million payout depending on performance.

In another life and another time, I ran the network testing program at PC Magazine. Back then, Mag (as it was called) evaluated application and device performance primarily on 10Mbps (gasp) or later a 100Mbps Ethernet link -- pretty much the state of the art then.

AMD is dusting off an old chestnut as it looks to reinvigorate its relationship with PC enthusiasts. The company has announced that it's bringing the FX moniker back for its latest desktop performance platform.

With the price-per-gigabyte still too high for most people to use a solid state drive as the primary storage for their PC, tech companies are trying to figure out novel ways to combine the performance advantages of SSDs with the massive storage of today's hard drives. Gigabyte just showed off a new motherboard that has a 20GB SSD built right into it, and now OCZ is showing off a SSD and hard drivecombination that fits on a PCI Express x4 card.